Anna Bailey Kelly from Anna's Own

Anna Bailey Kelly from Anna's Own (1995 - 2017) Character Post 2

2017 cover

Anna Bailey is a fourteen-year-old maid servant when we meet her at the beginning of the book, Anna's Own. The daughter of a barmaid and a schoolmaster, Anna is well-spoken and biddable. She is thrilled when Miss Verity, the daughter of the house where she is in service, chooses her as her lady's maid. Subsequently, Anna attracts the attention of Verity's dissolute brother and also gets embroiled with Verity's intrigues and elopement. As a result of both misfortunes, she finds herself sent off to Van Diemens Land on a convict ship for attempted murder. 

Anna is a survivor. She has inherited intelligence and a love of learning from her father, and a good business head from her mother, and she puts these to use in her new life. One of her enduring characteristics is a capacity for devotion; first for the undeserving Verity, then for a kindly passenger aboard ship, for her sensible mistress in Van Diemens Land, for her feckless but charming Irish husband, and for her children and, eventually, for the man who has loved her for years. 
Anna is not a flashy heroine. She's not drop-dead beautiful, and she's not always sweet-tempered, but she is quietly tenacious and cuts her cloak according to her cloth. As a teenager and a young woman she has very little chance of making her own decisions, but later, left alone while her husband is off prospecting, and later when he dies, she quietly arranges things the best way she can.

Original Cover

She is a woman of her time in more ways than one. By the end of the story, Anna is a widow in her forties. She has rejected a proposal of marriage from her longtime admirer, but made him an alternative offer which he is happy to accept.  As for what happened to her later, she was to have appeared in the second book in the series; Shepherd's Rest, but somehow that's never been written-- so far! 

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change.